Whyboy Spotlights… Producing Parker

The life of a daytime talk-show producer can be hell. Find out how much of a hell in Whyboy’s Spotlight of Breakthrough Entertainment’s Producing Parker.

I’ve had my share of producing content in my life; a music video, an animation review series, a murder mystery play, and each time there are always new and amazing things that will make producers just want to rip their hair out in frustration and cry. Guess this is why I took such a liking to Breakthrough’s series Producing Parker. The series is about Parker Kovak (Kristin Booth), a producer on the Oprah-esque talk show, The Dee Show, and the series details her weekly adventures usually coinciding with themes of motherhood, binge eating and other celebrity gossip topics. Now seeing as Producing Parker is heading to Hulu there’s been no better time then the present for a tiny retrospective.

As I said just two sentences ago this is a weekly episodic series, with a celebrity gossip theme of the week. For example, episode 3 “Skinny on Parker” shows both sides of the eating issue for celebrities, gaining too much weight and losing too much weight. Now this is where I can Segway into my main thoughts of the show and it can best be described by comparing Producing Parker to another show The Dating Guy. The Dating Guy is basically the weekly episodic escapades of a guy who has sex with a ton of CWAZY women, and the series was based on the real life adventures of one of the producers’ buddies… at first. But let me ask you this, if you were an animation studio who has to spend tens of thousands of dollars to pay your animators to animated frame after frame of animation, would you animate basically an animated version of How I Met Your Mother?

Of course not. Why would you need to animate that? You can clearly do it in live action for a fraction of the cost. That was the Dating Guy’s problem. So, producers had to tell there writers, turn the CWAZY up to 11 so at least there’s an excuse to have it animated. This ploy really only elevates the show to only slightly tolerable but what does this have to do with Producing Parker? Well Producing Parker from a writing perspective, feels like it could be a live action sitcom without much damage done (except for the talking dog but let’s hold off on that). But Producing Parker one ups Dating Guy by actually making its steps into the insane cartoony territory feel natural in the universe of the show. Out of context, the things in this show sound positively insane; conjoined twins tied to a rocket, a Hall-9000 parody getting a boner, a time machine, because of the world of the show and these characters the audience is allowed to suspend their disbelief and truly enjoy the show on its own merit.

That leads me to talk about the characters, and I really do love these characters but not because they’re perfect. Hell no. Who likes someone who’s perfect? An interesting character is a character with flaws and these characters are more human because of them. First we have Parker Kovak, our main heroine, a complete workaholic who puts her own health and sanity on the line just to produce a weekly show starring one of the craziest bitches period. Parker is quite honestly one of the strongest female characters I’ve ever seen. Always sticking to her morals (unless for a joke) and keeping a very upbeat attitude that is infectious. Kristin Booth nails Parker’s innocent persona which makes the episodes all the more hilarious where Parker does activities that can be best described as “not innocent.”

Next let’s talk about that crazy bitch that makes Parker’s life so complicated, Dee, played by Kim Catrell and she completely owns her role as this sex crazed, alcoholic, sleaze who is also America’s sweetheart. She’s that character you just love to hate because she doesn’t give a crap that she’s practically Satan, she just wants popularity. Throughout the series, watching as she flounders at her low points and boisterously gloats during her high points it’s just plain gold watching this women ruin the lives of everyone around her, including herself.

The last of my favorite characters is Massimo, Parker’s dog and like many of you new viewers of the show I thought too “Oh come on! A talking dog! Family Guy Clone!” But no, back when I first watched the show I was proven wrong, while Brain Griffin is used as more of a fresh breeze of reality to offset the Griffins growing insanity, Massimo is like… a dog. Kind, dependable, and always looking out for his owner. His dialogue sounds exactly like if you just placed a mic into the brain of workaholic’s dog and just wrote down what he said. Massimo is the anchor and moral support for Parker, a character outside the circle of entertainment that she can vent her frustrations to organically. Guess it’s no secret that my favorite character dynamic in the show is between Massimo and Parker.

The other characters like Simon, Chicago, Hal and Russell are fun characters too but they more fill the space of the archetypical characters in the entertainment field. Like Simon is the underappreciated writer, Chicago is the ditsy hot blond who gets all the breaks, Hal is the quiet handyman and Russell is the flamboyant hairdresser. All sound very stock and dull but with the speed and rapid fire of their dialogue it’s actually not anything like that.

Time to hit on the hot button of the series, the constant sex references, nipple slips and etc. I ain’t a prude, hell, I watched the Drawn Together Movie and just found it boring. However for a show that was only rated 14+ there is a LOT of very suggestive jokes in this show which, by the way, are for the most part non-stop hilarious in my book. Although for a brand new viewer, these suggestive jokes may come off bizarre at first. This is just a warning to those who are interested to just expect it to see this pop up constantly, and once you know to expect this humour (and you like sexual humour) you’ll dig this shows sense of humour and wit.

Finally onto the animation and design of the series, it again reminds me of the Dating Guy, as it had a very sharp style to its edging and character designs. Yet again Producing Parker out does it by also having beautiful pastel colored backgrounds, and a more faded lining for all the background imagery. This style works to give the settings a sleek but chaotic style to them, just like the life of Parker.

To round off, the characters, theming, and art design of the show are fantastic and I would recommend this show to anyone. Although I don’t think it is for everyone however. It definitely has a wit and charm that isn’t seen that often and for some it will weird them out. But we’ve especially haven’t seen this sort of wit in a long time in piece of shit shows like The Dating Guy so I think producing Parker deserves a chance to burrow into your heart. If you haven’t seen Producing Parker yet then get onto Hulu and watch the entire series.